A Synchronicity Or Coincidence? What Is Behind Curious Events?

As happens throughout history, named persons end up meeting. In this case, Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. As this article says:

Jung and Pauli struck an unusual friendship, which lasted a quarter century until Pauli’s death and resulted in the invention of synchronicity — acausally connected events, which the observer experiences as having a meaningful connection on the basis of his or her subjective situation, a meeting point of internal and external reality.

The two corresponded (a new volume is out; email will kill these treasures). We need a small handful of quotations to narrow in on their definition of sychronicity. In one letter, Pauli wrote about Jung’s notion of synchronicity:

The idea of meaningful coincidence — i.e., simultaneous events not causally connected — was expressed very clearly by Schopenhauer in his essay “On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual.”

[…]

This essay of Schopenhauer’s had a lasting and fascinating effect on me and seemed to be pointing the way to a new trend in natural sciences. But whereas [he] wanted at all costs to cling to the rigid determinism along the lines of the classical physics of his day, we have now acknowledged that in the nuclear world, physical events cannot be followed in causal chains through time and space…

Pauli made this diagram (I think this rendering is from an artist at the magazine):

Jung answered:

“Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.

Lastly (for us), Pauli returns:

Synchronicity should be defined in a narrower sense so as to comprise effects that only appear when there is a small number of individual cases but disappear when there is a larger number… In quantum physics, there are not just effects that appear with large numbers instead of with small ones, and not only is the term “meaning” not the right one here (which you have written about at great length) but also the concept of the (psychic or psychoid) archetype cannot be used so lightly in the acausalities of microphysics.

A synchronicity thus seems to be an event or event which an individual takes as meaningful in some way, and in which no apparent causal connection can be established. The event or events are “acausal.” Pauli also seems to believe that quantum interactions have no cause.

It is my contention that this definition (or any definition of synchronicity I have seen) is incoherent. That causality is always there (even for quantum interactions), even if not understood.

Before he retired, David Spiegelhalter ran the Understanding Uncertainty webpage, still up but officially inactive, in which he solicited stories which became part of the Cambridge Coincidences Collection.

Recall that one definition of a coincidence is where an event or events occur with no ascribed causal ties. Not acausal: no-causal. It’s not that it is known (a key) there are no causal ties, but it is decided there are not. You have a cup of coffee this morning and me having a cup of coffee this morning is a coincidence–co-incidents. This is in no way remarkable (assuming its accuracy), and so would never be noted as a coincidence. Coincidence requires at least some humor or spiciness of detail—or seeming rarity. And synchronicity is nothing more than coincidence except that acausal becomes a causal possibility (I say).

Quoting one of the coincidence submissions which works well for this because we can do easy calculations on it (ellipsis original).

I have a six digit lock code on my phone. I forgot the 4 digit code for my bank card so requested a new pin. On receiving the new pin code. The new pin code was the middle four numbers of my phone lock code in the correct order…

There are a million possible 6-digit phone lock codes (each of the 6 digits can be 0–9, and you multiply the possibilities of each). It follows there are only 10 thousand possible 4 middle digits. The acausal chance of a 4-digit bank pin matching the phone code middle 4 digits would thus be 1 in 10,000.

(This assumes banks might start a pin with a 0. If not, then the chance of matching is not quite that, but close enough.)

However, we might suppose that the person submitting this story would have been just as amazed had the new pin matched the first 4 digits of his phone code, or even the last 4. That makes the acausal chance of matching at least one of these possibilities about 3 out of 10,000. Of course, this is surmise on our part. The man might have only been surprised with the middle match.

And that’s about as far as we can go. Perhaps we could consider if our man would have been surprised if the new pin was the reverse of a sequence in the phone code, or in the same order but split, or whatever. All these kinds of multiple possibilities would push the acausal probability of matching one of these sequences to maybe as high as 1 in a thousand.

Which still seems unlikely, as far as things like this are. And it’s that unlikeliness that grabs and seduces. Consider if the new bank pin started with a 1, say, and the man had a 1 somewhere in his 6-digit phone code. It’s difficult to see how anybody would consider this a meaningful coincidence. The acausal chance of matching a single digit out of 6 is something close to 50-50. And so not remarkable.

It is the marvel at the unlikely match that causes one to think “something” might be going on. Perhaps marvel is too strong a word. Curious is better. In this case, the man must at least have been curious about the match or he would have never posted his story. And what contributed to that curiosity surely was the seeming low chance of the match when there was no obvious causal connecting story. He would not need to know how to do the calculation, of course, but only suspect its unlikely outcome.

Calling the match a synchronicity, or even coincidence, means there is at least a suspicion, if not outright belief, there is a causal force tying events together. And this is so even though Jung and Pauli called such connections acausal. But then their definition of cause was the modern and not the classical. It is thus obvious Jung must have meant efficient causes of the event or events comprising synchronicity operate as they normally would. But to find events “significant” (not in the dreary statistical use of that word) or “meaningful” must mean the teleology behind the events is thought to have been influenced or controlled.

In other words, if you were that man, you have to figure that something was behind the bank-pin-phone match. If not, you have pass the match off as a coincidence, nothing more than a curisosity. It’s that low chance of the match that makes you consider there was something behind the pin match in the first place.

Go back to the “have a 1 in the both codes” example. This is not improbable, and would almost surely never even be noticed. But this is not proof, though it is good evidence, that the teleology of the event was not influenced in some way to make it meaningful for you, even if you don’t see it (at first or ever).

Here’s a more fanciful example to explain what I mean. There is a mossy rock in the path which you will surely step on and slip and so crack your sacroiliac. But before you can, God himself causes a squirrel to ferret (God can mix metaphors with ease) the stone off the path before you see it, hence you never even know this synchronicity or coincidence happened.

Now again the pin-code match. The man can’t help but think something tied the events together. But what? Not some efficient cause. But something. It’s not that definitiveness is required. You don’t have to have the full causal explanation in mind. You can say it’s “some entity”, even “Nature”, some “force” that binds.

And you don’t have to believe it fully. Just give it some weight more than zero. A zero weight turns the synchronicity into an amusing coincidence. A synchronicity can only be felt when there is a some teleological causal tie that is imagined. It can be dissolved, too, by for instance showing an event one thought was improbable was in fact not improbable, or by showing the full causal path of the separate events. The latter cannot be done in the bank-pin match because the man will never how how the pin was generated.

The former ties in Pauli’s notion that it’s only individual events which generate synchronicities, events which when suitably grouped show mere statistical regularity. That’s the acid that can dissolve the improbability of many singular events.

Suppose there are a million people who have 6-digit phone codes and who receive pin codes for their new or lost cards (perhaps an undercount?). The chance at least one of these people finds a match between the middle 4 of the phone code and the pin is nearly certain. Indeed, we’d expect about 100 such matches in our sample of a million.

If the man could be brought to understand this calculation, he might give up on his imagined teleological tie. I say only “might”, because he also might cherish that slippery tie. Perhaps not in this weak-sauce pin code match example, but for events which themselves are thought more meaningful.

Take this story from the source:

So, I have been having synchronicity about a fictional character for about 5 months. The character is from a kids show called Gravity Falls, and is named Bill. I started to track these occurences, and I am currently at 69. These coincidences have been everything from hyper realistic dreams to clothing items that were gifted to me ( I guess I own a cartigan now..). It is still going on, and it’s become an inside joke between me and my friends. Whenever someone hase a reoccuring dream or coincidence, we call it Cipher Disease. The funny thing is that is still going it on, and does not seem to be slowing down or stopping. If anything it has become more and more frequent. So, yeah.

It is easy, and much easier than you think, to find coincidences between people, even fictional people. Which I’ll show mathematically in another post. But, assuming we have the numbers before us, do you think this calculation would convince this fellow there is “nothing” in his discovery?

To prove my contention synchronicity about wrong, we would have to find an example of a purported synchronicity in which we believe the person holding the synchronicity does not posit or not give non-zero weight to some binding force or teleological cause behind the events in question. That would be a coincidence and not thought of as a synchronicity.

I have read many of these accounts, and I haven’t seen any that fits this. Perhaps you know of one.

All these examples amplify the negative side, but I want to stress I do no think all such stories belong to this genre. I do not believe that at all. My point rather stronger: that for genuine instances there must be some underlying binding cause.

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